Deception and Misrepresentation in Online or Face-to-Face Interaction

Since the 21st century has been around, there has been a rise of online romances because there are matchmaking sites that are growing daily. From eHarmony, to match.com, people are meeting, mingling, and falling in love, more often from online communication versus face-to-face interaction. Nowadays, people may be shy to go on blind dates or pick up someone at a bar. So individuals who are looking for love, use the internet to try to meet a potential mate for either themeselves or their friends. However, the disadvantages of online communication versus face-to-face communication is that someone's identity may not be what they may be claimed to be, for example a man may be posing to be a female, or a female a male. Another disadvantage or deception and misrepresentation can be that people can use outdated photos or photos of other people and they may also lie about their sex, race, and other forms of identity according to our text on page 278. In face-to-face interaction, people are able to see someone in person and they will know for sure what their race is, their sex, unless it is hard to tell, however online we may never know if someone is lying or not unless we conduct a credit and background check on them. Also as the text also mentions, it is hard to judge some aspects of chemistry without meeting face-to-face.

I do not think it is ethical for people to represent themselves inaccurately because they are deceiving people. However, it depends how they are misrepresenting themselves. If they are using outdated pictures of themselves or someone else's picture, then I do not think that is ethical at all. They are lying to the other person and are deceiving them. I think deception is likely to happen in both online and in face-to-face interaction, however I would say it most likely occurs more in online interaction because people can lie about their age, sex, etc. Rather in person, people cannot lie about those things since we are able to see them, in person they can lie about their job, or their lifestyle, and people can also lie about those in online interaction as well.